Stats show Chelsea defending better but attacking worse after a year of Enzo Maresca | OneFootball

With eleven games played, we can finally start to draw some conclusions about the stats from Chelsea’s season so far.

The ever excellent Kier Doyle on Twitter has just put out a table which compares the team in the equivalent fixtures from last season across a number of important metrics – expected goals for, expected goals against, shots, shots against, box touches box touches against and so on.

Chelsea worse in attack but better in defence than in equivalent games from last year

What he’s found is that we’re broadly similar to last season. we’re worse off in 5 of the 8 categories, but that can largely be explained by the red cards we picked up in a couple of games which killed our attacking threat. The Manchester United game where Robert Sanchez got an early red is such an outlier that it really drags things down – we had just 5 shots in that game, with our next lowest being 12 and the average excluding that outlier actually sitting close to 15.

The most notable drops are actually defensively – we’re conceding fewer shots and allowing fewer touches in our box. If we can maintain that and push up our attacking numbers by not getting regular reds, we should be looking good when we check in on this again in the spring.

You can see the full table in the image embedded here:

Chelsea’s date from this season and last season combined.

In other news…

A major reason for these stats not looking as healthy as they could is the huge absence of Cole Palmer, which has disrupted the whole season. He’s closing in a return to action, however.

With Palmer returning, we don’t expect Chelsea to do much business in January. One move being suggested is for Endrick, the Brazilian wonderkid who once cost £50m. We have major doubts he’ll be coming to Chelsea, however.